Dear Self,

You wanted so badly to be good.
To be respected.
To be safe.

I understand why. For a long time, being seen felt dangerous. Not the seeing that comes with interviews, branding calls, or standing on a stage, but the kind that happens on the page. You were afraid of being known by your sentences. You wanted to tell the story without exposing the part of you that carried it.

But you’ve always known that when you try to be safe, you write around the truth instead of through it. You imply instead of reveal. You protect your characters because you’re trying to protect yourself. You soften what was never meant to be soft.

So you rejected that. Your debut was heavy—so heavy some readers couldn’t hold it. Neither could you. When it went into the world, you felt hollowed out. For almost a year, you moved through days in a haze, unable to read anything or begin again. Your husband finally dug you out from under the fear that you only had one book in you, that you could only write one thing. You finally started something new. This time, you told yourself you would be gentler, easier to hold.  It didn’t feel right, but it felt easy. You told yourself that this softness was healing.

You wrote a few thousand words with smoothed edges, a gentler offering.
Your agent read them and said what you already knew: This isn’t you. Try again. 
And she was right.

A story knows when you’re underplaying it. It knows when you’re writing to be liked, and it refuses to sing in your ear under those conditions.

So you took your hand off your mouth. You looked for inspiration inside and out, and you found it.

You didn’t write asking Will they like this? Will it sell? Will this hurt me?
You wrote asking Am I honoring the story that chose me?

Some stories come because they recognize us. They settle in the bones and whisper: Tell it. Tell it right, even if it hurts.

That’s what Sweet Water has been. A story that refused to let you hide. These characters—these tangled, tender, flawed people—demanded honesty. You knew these people. They didn’t want to be cleaned up or forgiven. They wanted to be seen.

You let them. You remembered what you promised yourself when you were the teenage girl who wrote because no one ever listened. You vowed that if you were ever given the chance to have an audience, you would tell it all. You’d write honestly. So you never write a character as only one thing. You write for the reader who can hold these contradictions.  Humanness is messy, and you never write to reassure.

You write to show the truth of how people love when they are lonely. How someone can be the best thing that ever happened to another soul, and still be the wound that never closes.

You don’t write for approval. You write for the quiet recognition that happens when a reader finds themselves in your pages and feels understood.

You once heard that a writer must define her own measure of success. You couldn’t back then. You measured in praise and numbers and noise. But now you know.

Success is the quiet certainty that you told the story truthfully, even when it asked you to be seen.

With grace,

Rae